Why drag me to hell, star Alison Loman is gone from Hollywood

When I was a kid, I wanted to see every Alison Loman movie I could find. The actor may not be a household name, but throughout the 2000s she starred in some of the most interesting films ever made, often alongside more experienced stars like Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicolas Cage and Ewan McGregor. Lohmann has always played characters younger than herself, and I mentally compared her to other teen stars like Anna-Sophia Robb and Keke Palmer, even though she was born in 1979.

Lohmann was sometimes cast as a cherubic beauty, but at other times she played more complex characters, including troubled teens, child con artists and, perhaps most famously, a “witch” who hates a promotion seeker. During her career, the actress appeared in less than two dozen films, but most of them were fascinating. Then, around 2009, she practically disappeared from the spotlight. In the decade and a half since then, Lohmann has appeared in only three additional roles. Where did she go? Fortunately, this is not a secret: she has answered this question in several interviews in recent years.

Lohmann’s first screen roles came in 1998, when she appeared in the TV series 7th Heaven and Pacific Blue, as well as the incredible (or incredibly bad, depending on your tastes) monster movie Kraa The Sea Monster”. Lohmann continued to appear in small roles and obscure titles over the next four years, until she finally gained recognition playing the jaded Astrid in the Warner Bros. adaptation of The White Oleander. According to The Hollywood ReporterLohmann beat out nearly 400 other young actors to land the role, and the critical response to her star performance was remarkable. “Astrid is an extremely difficult and lengthy role for an actor with no prior gaming experience, but Lohmann takes it on with great confidence,” Variety’s Robert Keller. wrote at the time.

After “White Oleander,” Loman told THR that she started getting casting offers, and her agent even told her she was in the running for the role of Mary Jane in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man.” Over the next few years, she appeared in Tim Burton’s fable “Big Fish”, Ridley Scott’s “Matchstick Men” and the loose adaptation of the grasshopper classic “My Friend Flicka”. Lohmann also lent her voice to Hayao Miyazaki’s English dub Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds played a very grown-up role opposite Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth in the thriller Where the Truth Lies and appeared in Robert Zemeckis’ uncanny valley Beowulf as Ursula. Then, in 2009, Lohmann capped off an incredible decade with the gory sci-fi film The Player and finally working with Raimi on the even creepier horror hit Drag Me To Hell.

After all, Lohmann has been an actor for more than a decade, and it was clear from her conversation with THR in 2022 that the wide range of productions she’s been involved in — some physically demanding, others mentally so — has been cumulatively taxing. She lived in a small Alaskan town on the set of Robin Williams’ black comedy The Great White, learned to “ride a horse, fall and get up … the hard way” on Flicka, and did extensive green adaptations of Beowulf. Loman remained positive about all of those experiences, but said that when she visited Wyoming while filming Flicka, she was already considering a move from Los Angeles.

A career that began with an emotionally difficult role as a teenager in foster care in The White Oleanders ended with an even more grueling role in Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell. Lohmann told THR that while she loves Raimi, “this movie required a level of commitment that was a lot more than I thought it would be when I first started. It’s been a long, long, long time.” Towards the end of the production, she developed shingles, and the doctor woke her up, saying, “Whatever you’re doing, you’ve got to stop because you’re going to get sick.” When she met her husband, Mark Neveldine, while making Gamer, she said what he told her changed her outlook on life: “He said, ‘You know, you don’t have to work. You can take a break,'” she recalled retrospective by THR. “No one ever told me that.”

In an interview in 2024 from IndieWireLohman said she felt like she was “just pulled around and manipulated by so many acting coaches who didn’t mean well” when she first started out in the industry. It’s also not the first time she’s mentioned bad actors in Hollywood. In her THR profile from two years ago, she complimented the creatives she’s worked with who don’t have any “egos,” while giving shoutouts to Burton, Raimi, and Robin Williams. She also noted that Ridley Scott trusted his actors in Matchstick, stating, “That’s what a good director does.”

In contrast, Lohmann’s description of her work on Where Is The Truth , an unrated film noir in which she plays a 70s journalist who is manipulated by the men around her, is quite eloquent. She called director Atham Eoghan “a great director” but said it “was one of the roles I probably shouldn’t have done”. She attributed the mistake to her lack of understanding of the character from the start and said that “even (Eoghan) was a bit unsure of my abilities and it snowballed. He was trying to save him and control him, but the more you do, the more it gets twisted.”

“Where the Truth Is” is a pretty lousy movie that includes a scene where Colin Firth’s character gets reporter Loman drunk and convinces her to have sex with a woman in order to get blackmail material. The film’s poster clearly shows the faces of stars Bacon and Firth, while the only woman we see (who could be either Lohmann or Maureen Rachel Blanchard) is shown naked from behind as she looks at the men. Reviews of the film were uniformly sexist; referring to the scene in which the character is found dead, Ruth Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Lohmann was “so shrill and irritating as Karen that you end up wishing she was the one swimming in that tub.”

Again, Lohmann didn’t seem offended by the film, but when asked about what she’s taken from her time as an actor, she told THR , “I would make sure that whatever movie I choose, that the character really resonated with me somewhere. And that the director had faith in me and entrusted me with the role so they didn’t have to control it.”

According to Lonman, she was never too keen on the idea of ​​becoming mega-famous. She told IndieWire that she remembers being faced with the decision after “Drag Me To Hell” was released. “It was like, do you want to be famous? I don’t think I really, really wanted it, to be in the public eye,” she explained.

Speaking to THR , Loman said she didn’t like the way she was treated when she was a celebrity. “I love the anonymity of when you meet someone and they don’t know who you are, they’re so different from you,” she told the publication. “That’s something you miss as a famous actor because people treat you so differently, and it’s true. You’re not actually going through what normal people go through because it’s so pampered and unreal.” She seems to enjoy the anonymity of life after acting, saying: “When someone finds out I used to be an actress, in some weird way, it’s kind of a bummer because they don’t see me anymore. The bubble bursts and I Now I’m an actress, I just want to be me.’

Loman is far from the first actor to leave Hollywood in part because of a desire for less fame; Helen Hunt has been making similar claims for yearsand it’s easy to see why a spotlight’s glow can feel harsh and artificial after prolonged exposure.

Lohmann said that when she met Neveldine and he encouraged her to take a break when she needed it, she started thinking about ideas related to farm life. The couple then bought a 200-acre farm in upstate New York and, according to IndieWire, got two goats as a wedding present. When they started having children, Lohmann said she realized she didn’t really enjoy juggling the two different worlds of acting and parenting. “Maybe I’m like a micromanager, but it’s hard for me to get in and out. It’s like two different lives,” she told IndieWire.

Since 2009, Lohmann has appeared in only three films, including Neveldine’s The Vatican Tapes. She told THR that she got a lot of job offers when her kids were too young for her to take them, but after about five years, they stopped. Lohmann said she sometimes misses acting, but now she teaches it and hopes to create a better experience for beginners than the one she had with acting coaches. “I have a healthy understanding of what it means to be an actor. I have no other ego-driven paths,” she told IndieWire last year. She also said she would work with Raimi again soon; “I would do anything with Sam,” she told THR, describing the horror legend as a “creative genius” and “like a kid in a candy store.”

In what may be one of the most unexpected ‘where are they now’ codes, Lohmann has endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 election. write on X (formerly Twitter) that she would be voting Republican for the first time. “I feel we can live in a safer and healthier country with @RobertKennedyJr and @realDonaldTrump,” she said in a message on the day of the vote.